Not only have the venerable Japanese company just delayed the hotly-anticipated Twilight Princess until next year to add some more layers of spit and polish, thus practically guaranteeing the title’s place in the pantheon of immortal video games (anyone notice the more Nintendo kept to their release schedules during this generation, the more flaws their games had?), but the big N have got a massive, ginormous, stupendously exciting announcement in the offing; that being, of course, the proper announcement and unveiling of the Revolution. And it’s coming right now. But before we get to that, let’s sit back for a moment and reflect on the current state of play.

Let’s face it, the current console generation hasn’t been too kind to Nintendo. Despite having shifted in excess of 18 million GameCubes, only a fraction behind Microsoft’s console, it is the Xbox that is seen as the big winner in challenging Sony’s dominance of the home console market. Common perception is that Nintendo are very much a fading force in gaming. Let me be frank. GameCube owners in Europe and America particularly, have been sidelined. Ridiculed, even. I’ve heard the stories on internet forums, even personal testimony, of Nintendo fans being laughed at for their adulation of games featuring Mario, Yoshi, and Samus Aran. Over the years most of my Nintendo-loving friends from primary school have left the company behind. They’ve grown up. Moved on to bigger and better things. I’ve become something of a lone ranger. In the West, Nintendo’s image in the playground, if you will, has gone from bad to worse. Sony’s imminent PSP handheld has already captured the attention of those weaned on the Game Boy.

The PSP’s impressive multimedia capabilities appeal more to Western sensibilities than the DS ever could, despite Nintendo’s hitherto total dominance of that particular market.

You can imagine, then, that the troops’ morale is probably at a low ebb at the moment. The GameCube left with nary an essential title for the latter part of the year, with the next-generation powerhouses all set to steal a march on Revolution’s 2006 launch. Nintendo’s handheld dominance remains under serious threat. And a host of developers who haven’t worked out that the DS is a machine with wonderful potential, and who rather insist on making GBA ports with gratuitous touch-screen usage. Sounds pretty grim, eh?

But that would be to underestimate the fact that Nintendo’s core support is radically different to that of either Sony or Microsoft. For a variety of reasons, Nintendo inspire a kind of loyalty that Sony or Microsoft can only dream of.

They may have a stupid, lumbering approach to marketing. They mess up release schedules in defiance of common sense. They might never learn from their repeated mistakes. But we love them all the same.

We love how they make shocking business decisions like delaying Zelda until a time when GameCube shelf space will be reduced to precisely zip and missing the lucrative Christmas season. We love that they didn’t announce Mario 128,despite our loud protestations, because they just hadn’t come up with a brilliant, earth-shattering idea that would differentiate it enough from its illustrious predecessors.

We love them because we know that at the end of the day there’ll be another Pikmin, Mario or Zelda to celebrate with at the end- and I wouldn’t have them any other way (although a bit of clever marketing, or even just marketing of any description, would be nice).

And the devoted fans have come out of the woodwork, particularly in the months since E3 (but in truth long before that) to build a hype machine around the mysterious Revolution that has become quite phenomenal.

Hype. I thought I’d seen it all, to be honest- it’s been around since the year dot, and has become more prevalent in gaming as the modern obsession with image has increased (or rather worsened). What is most remarkable about the hype surrounding the Revolution is that Nintendo have done very little to create it. Granted, NCL boss Satoru Iwata insists on making cryptic clues during every address he makes, and the limited information given during the E3 press conference was intriguing, but since then Nintendo have more or less maintained a deafening silence on the subject.

Rather, it is Nintendo fans, using the medium of the internet, who have began a frenzied, conspiratorial and frankly belief-beggaringly sustained campaign of rumour, deception, spin, outright lies, guessing games and hysterical speculation. Hardly a day goes by without a brand new bogus Revolution controller design, often strikingly elaborate, and occasionally of a quality so high that most of us are taken in.

There are literally hundreds of blogs out there, if you care to look, from people purporting to be ex-Nintendo employees or from second-party developers, ‘leaking’ hints and details about the ‘revolutionary aspect’ of the console. These fraudsters update regularly, sustaining their hoax (often remarkably believable) over months, and exposing each other for the over-excited Revolution-watchers they really are.

We’ve heard just about everything by now- from stereoscopic displays to ‘resistant’ gyroscopic force-feedback controls, to ridiculous-looking headsets and visors, to Star Trek style Holodecks (which would probably be just about the only thing that would prevent the actual, bona fide Revolution announcement from being a deflating experience, given the unfeasibly high expectations of the gaming public).

We've watched with bewilderment as Nintendo’s business dealings have been placed under the microscope, desperately trying to glean some sort of hard Revolution info. Have Nintendo been pouring money into NASA? If so, why? What’s the deal with Gyration Inc.? The conspiracy theories out there are so wide and varied, they make the aftermath of the JFK assassination look like idle, muted speculation.

And then there have been the ‘ton’ rumours. Log on to the likes of IGN’s Revolution board at any time since May and you’ll find that Nintendo are planning on unveiling the console fully tomorrow- and if not, the day after that. ‘THURSDAYTON IS COMING!’ and ‘OMG! WEDNESDAYTON IS THE DAY’ are two average forum thread titles. Thousands waited with bated breath after rumours flooded the net that Nintendo were to stage a dramatic impromptu full Revolution unveiling on the final day of E3. They didn’t, of course, but for a few hours the dream remained alive. And that’s what it’s all about, really. The dream that the glory days might return again.

Some forum-goers have taken to rapidly producing banners to celebrate the impending announcement that never seems to come- a selection of the most amusing are below. It’s all very silly, but their enthusiasm is most definitely infectious; I find myself scanning through news syndication sites daily for a daily fix of fresh rumours (and I’m invariably handsomely rewarded). I know it’s wrong but I’ve been bitten by the hype bug. Feel free to join me - but just remember that in all likelihood you’re going to be disappointed when Nintendo bring you down to earth with a bump in the morning, because in your heart of hearts you know that Nintendo aren’t going to announce a virtual reality headset with brain implants.

This whole Revolution saga has been, if nothing else, a testament to the power of the imagination. It’s also heartening to see that the Nintendo community can still make a bigger noise than anybody else when they want to, and that a new system from the big N can evoke such powerful emotions.

All in all, it’s a fine time to be a Nintendo fan - a videogames fan, even. With the next generation, in the form of the Xbox 360 set to arrive in the next few months (as well as the recent release of Sony’s PSP - come on, stop the moaning, there’s enough room in the market for two handhelds), the DS going online with Mario Kart, and the fabled, legendary, elusive Revolution announcement barely hours away, I think we’ve never had it this good. And of course there’s the small matter of Zelda, too.

Let’s enjoy the ride while it lasts. This, my friends, is as good as it gets.

Mark Cullinane
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